Five years ago, Lindsey Jordan’s OCD entered a “tailspin” – prompted, the musician better known as Snail Mail says, by the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, the surreal, death-obsessed movie sees Philip Seymour Hoffman play a dramatist whose sense of reality begins to fold in on itself. “I accidentally developed a pretty severe OCD thing about dying from that movie,” Jordan says, plainly. “The all-seeing narrator in it just drops all these awful life spoilers that I’ve been spending so much time in my life consciously not trying to think about. Then it became just a part of everything that I do. And it just started becoming this awful thing that I couldn’t get rid of, where anytime I’d be having a rewarding time or doing something I care about, it would ruin me being present.”
This destabilising period resonates throughout Jordan’s muscular and atmospheric new album, Ricochet, the third Snail Mail LP after her 2018 breakthrough Lush and 2021’s Valentine. It’s almost certainly her best work to date: a melancholy, probing, 11-song record about mortality and existential dread that falls, she says, just shy of a concept album. “I don’t know if those exist, really, truly, anymore – but it is capturing everything about who I think I am right now. I don’t want to do it a disservice by calling it another ‘diary record’. I called Lush a diary record, but that gets sort of pigeonhole-y, because I’m like, ‘a girl with a diary’. Know what I mean?”
When she first broke through, the better part of a decade ago, Jordan was viewed as part of a burgeoning new sub-genre: angsty indie music led by young (often queer) women such as Phoebe Bridgers, Soccer Mommy, Lucy Dacus, or Mitski. Cue the influx of features with headlines like “Rock’s Not Dead, It’s Ruled by Women” (New York Times), “The Joy of Sad Girl Music” (Harper’s Bazaar), or “The Wry Young Women Writing Sad, Buoyant, Beautiful Songs” (The New Yorker). Yet Jordan never felt like part of a movement, and looking back now, “there’s kind of a weird energy”, she believes. “I think all the women that were getting grouped together didn’t feel that way.”
As we speak, she sits on a sofa in her house in North Carolina, leaning forward animatedly into her camera. She’s wearing a T-shirt that reads “Bandwagonesque”, an album by the Scottish alt-rock band Teenage Fanclub. “It is really cool that so many bands with women were getting pushed at that time,” she continues. “But it gave people this false idea that everything’s totally fine. And now I actually think we’re on the other side. We’re gonna see even less women in music soon, to be honest. I think we’re back to like, men rock.”
Jordan is doing her part, at least. Where much of her early songwriting plundered the conventional material of youth – love and heartbreak, albeit filtered through the specific lens of a world-weary Gen-Z lesbian – Ricochet has a different purview. Take “My Maker”, the album’s superb second single, a propulsive, The Sundays-indebted dream-pop number that imagines waiting at an airport bar on the way to the afterlife (“Bouncer in the sky / Let me in, I’m scared to die”).
Other songs tease at her own tricky relationship with success, while the lilting, richly orchestrated “Light on Our Feet” – a crescendoing anthem of a song with a hint of Bridgers to its melody – and “Reverie” are the only real love songs on the record. “I was trying to step out of having that just be my shtick,” Jordan says. “There’s parts [of the album] where I’m mourning how out of control I felt as a teenager in the music industry, with like bad people everywhere. The vulnerability of something that can’t defend itself.” She seems to fray a little as she utters this last thought.
Born in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, Jordan took to music early, learning classical guitar from age five. (Her musicianship has always been a great strength, and remains especially so on Ricochet.) Her mother owns a lingerie store called Bra-la-la; her father works for a company that makes educational textbooks. If her childhood provided some of the germs of her future artistry, then it also foreshadowed some of the challenges she’d face: she was a child with OCD tendencies, and a complicated relationship with religion.
Her vulnerabilities became a lamentable subject of online discussion after she alluded, briefly, on a song from Valentine, to a 45-day stint in rehab she completed in Arizona, in November 2020. (She previously told Pitchfork that she was “dealing with a unique set of circumstances and challenges rooted in being so young when I started”.) In the years since, however, that admission fuelled a wave of conjecture, something Jordan refers to as the “substance conversation”. “I never go looking for things,” she says. “I never look at Reddit. But people tell me [when I’m mentioned], which sucks.”
Part of me really wishes I never put that lyric in, because it caused so much trouble for me, honestly
“I think it’s crazy,” she continues, “because I don’t ever want to drop too much information about what happened there. But I wasn’t [in rehab] for drugs or alcohol. I was there because some gnarly s*** happened in my life, and I was needing some intervention. And so after that, the substance conversation around me started. And it really pissed me off. Like, I didn’t include that lyric so y’all could study me.”
She grows visibly vexed. “I just don’t want people formulating a false idea about me,” she continues. “It feels unfair, and it makes me not want to say much about any choice I’m making in my personal life. I sometimes think people shape what they think they’re going to get out of the show based on the fact that they think I went to rehab for some mysterious drug or alcohol.” She exhales. “Part of me really wishes I never put that lyric in, because it caused so much trouble for me, honestly.”
Not unrelatedly, Jordan now largely avoids social media (bar TikTok), but is currently back on Instagram for Ricochet’s album rollout. “I’m hating my life on there a bit,” she says. “You’re getting so much of people’s marketing; it makes me feel like I can’t think straight. Part of me thinks I’m stepping into a completely different industry, like I’ve become a football player – I have no idea what’s going on. It’s all algorithms, and people paying to flood Instagram. Everything is a weird trick. Sometimes I just wish all the data centres would just get burned down.”
There is something infectiously likeable about her, a real, unaffected earnestness. She speaks at pace, and with a firecracker enthusiasm that gives over at times to a sort of startling, unconcealed fragility. Perhaps this is to do with age – she is still, objectively, young, even with a decade of professional music behind her. “Last time we played Coachella, there were all these bands the same age as me there, and I felt like a weird old sage,” she jokes. “But it’s sick, because now I think I’m at a really good age to be a rock star, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes already.”
We chat for a bit about slightly less fraught topics. Jordan talks about her small role in Jane Schoenbrun’s cult 2024 movie I Saw the TV Glow, about a pair of queer kids who become fixated on a teen fantasy series – Jordan played the show-within-a-film’s Buffy Summers-esque lead. Today, I Saw the TV Glow is beloved, particularly within the trans community. “It’s probably my favourite thing to talk about actually… I’m constantly meeting new people like, ‘You ever hear of a little something called A24?’” she grins. Jordan talks about wanting to act more, to score a film, and about films in general. She is, she says, a “huge movie buff”.
I am heartened by how happy Jordan seems overall. Having spent a couple of weeks immersed in the splendid isolation of Ricochet, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. But while Jordan’s record might have been born of a miserable experience – that Kaufman-induced, obsessive morbidity – there is, she says, “no danger anymore of re-entering that whirlwind”. She even rewatched Synecdoche recently, and found it, if anything, a comfort.
“I had purposely avoided thinking about any of that stuff, for so long. And now, I’ve had no choice but to really sit in it, and think through it,” she says. “If I know I’m terrified of mortality, and terrified of wasting my life, the worst thing I could possibly do would be sabotage it all. And yeah, I don’t think I’m in danger of ever ending up in the same place – but I do think it completely changed who I am as a person.”
She smiles. “Which is crazy.”
‘Ricochet’ is out 27 March on Matador Records. Snail Mail is performing at London’s Electric Ballroom on 25 June
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